Music Marketing Services for Musicians, Artists & Record Labels

Music marketing is a set of strategies to create and promote the brand and work of an artist, band or music service provider, as well as build a bond with the intended audience or fanbase.

Music marketing generates buzz for your music or music services, creates opportunities for you to engage with current and potential fans, helps you book events more easily, boosts your sales, and communicates your professionalism as an artist.

An effective music marketing strategy involves defining and planning the following elements: establishing your brand and tone of voice, identifying your ideal audience, creating audio, text and visual content to be used in your chosen marketing channels, setting objectives and timelines for achieving them, and knowing what your budget is.

No two strategies are exactly alike, but major labels tend to bombard traditional media (like TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers) with ads. They also use music videos and live performances to monetize and promote their artists.

Independents aren’t much different, but they typically have restrictions labels do not, specifically in terms of financial and personnel resources. So, they will take fuller advantage of more low-cost methods like social media, blogging, email, in addition to other methods already mentioned.

Marketing is essentially the same across every industry. What’s unique about music (and digital products in general) is that it isn’t a consumable product. People don’t just buy one tube of toothpaste. Once they use it up, they buy more of it. Meanwhile, you can’t use up music. Once purchased, you can listen to it as many times as you want. Or, you can even go to a streaming site and stream it as many times as you want (sometimes without a subscription).

People must hear a song to become aware of it. But just because they are aware of it doesn’t mean they necessarily like it. It may take multiple listens. And, maybe if they hear it enough times, they’ll start to like it. If they like it, their chances of buying are much greater. So, people must first hear the music to get to the point where they like it, at which point they may choose to support the artist.

The best marketing channels for you to share the audio, text and visual content you create to promote your music project are: your website and/or online store, social media, ads, music platforms, newsletters, and networking.

The short answer is that it varies a lot. Some artists want to raise funds for their albums. Others want to get on niche radio stations. Still others want to get press exposure. How could there possibly be a one-size-fits-all solution? Virtually every campaign is unique in some way. Even a crowdfunding campaign can vary in scope because different artists want to raise different amounts of money.

A simple brand-building campaign could easily cost #500,000 to #2,000,000 or more depending on your objectives, the length of the campaign, advertising costs, content creation (i.e. video shooting and editing), and a variety of other factors.

Music marketing can cost a lot. But my advice would be to work with individuals and companies that focus on getting you results. If they charge for a bunch of work, and they can’t even show you what they’ve done, or how it has led to new opportunities for you, then their services may not be worth your hard-earned money.

Unfortunately, we can’t offer that service (and – trust us –  you wouldn’t want us to anyway!) We do – however – offer tour support for any touring artist. If an active client is touring, we pitch interviews, sessions, and ticket giveaways for supporting stations in tour markets. We can go after press in tour markets as well.